# a CD story: A Safe House for the Girl Within



## Darla (Nov 3, 2008)

Everyone wonders why CDs are not so forward about things sometimes. Although people are accepting here, its not exactly widely accepted in society. So even today everyone is a little guarded. Well today even everything is a far cry from the way it evidently was years. A came across this article about the way it was in 1963 where everything was very secretive. This articlee was in the NY Times. I thought it was interesting. Feel free to comment.

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source

* A Safe House for the Girl Within *

From â€œCasa Susannaâ€: Edited by Michel Hurst and Robert Swope (Powerhouse Books)







In the early 1960â€™s, Susanna Valenti, otherwise known as Tito, created a refuge for transvestites on 150 acres in the Catskills.

By PENELOPE GREEN

Published: September 7, 2006

THERE was a pilot and a businessman, an accountant, a librarian and a pharmacologist. There was a newspaper publisher, and a court translator. By day, they were the men in the gray flannel suits, but on the weekends, they were Felicity, Cynthia, Gail, Sandy, Fiona, Virginia and Susanna. It was the dawn of the 1960â€™s, yet they wore their late 50â€™s fashions with awkward pride: the white gloves, the demure dresses and low heels, the stiff wigs. Many were married with children, or soon would be. In those pre-Judith Butler, pre-Phil Donahue days, when gender was more tightly tethered to biology, these menâ€™s â€œgender migrations,â€ or â€œgender dysphoria,â€ as the sociologists began to call cross-dressing, might cost them their marriages, their jobs, their freedom.






Photographs from â€œCasa Susannaâ€: Edited by Michel Hurst and Robert Swope (Powerhouse Books)

At Casa Susanna, guests could indulge their wildest domestic urges: to play Scrabble in a dress, to trade makeup tips, and to take lots and lots of pictures.

And so they kept their feminine selves hidden, except for weekends at Casa Susanna, a slightly run-down bungalow camp in Hunter, N.Y., that was the only place where they could feel at home.

Decades later, when Robert Swope, a gentle punk rocker turned furniture dealer, came across their pictures â€” a hundred or so snapshots and three photo albums in a box at the 26th Street flea market in Manhattan â€” he knew nothing about their stories, or Casa Susanna, beyond the obvious: here was a group of men dressed as women, beautiful and homely, posing with gravity, happiness and in some cases outright joy. They were playing cards, eating dinner, having a laugh. They didnâ€™t look campy, like drag queens vamping it up as Diana Ross or Cher; they looked like small-town parishioners, like the lady next door, or your aunt in Connecticut.

Mr. Swope was stunned by the pictures and moved by the mysterious world they revealed. He and his partner, Michel Hurst, gathered them into a book, â€œCasa Susanna,â€ which was published by Powerhouse Books in 2005 and reissued last spring, and which became an instant sensation, predictably, in the worlds of fashion and design. Paul Smith stores sold it, as did the SoHo design store and gallery Moss, which made a Christmas diorama of a hundred copies last year. Last month, you might have seen it in the hands of a child-size mannequin in the Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker Street.

But it was only after the bookâ€™s publication that Mr. Swope and Mr. Hurst began to learn the story of Casa Susanna, first called the Chevalier dâ€™Eon resort, for an infamous 18th-century cross-dresser and spy, and only in recent months, as they have begun working on a screenplay about the place, that they have come to know some of its survivors.

â€œAt first, I didnâ€™t want to know more,â€ Mr. Swope said. â€œI didnâ€™t want to find out that the stories turned out to be tragedies.â€

But the publication of the book has drawn former Casa Susanna guests out, and it turns out that their stories, like most, have equal measures of tragic and comic endings. Some are still being told.

Robert Hill, a doctoral candidate in the American studies program at the University of Michigan who is completing his dissertation on heterosexual transvestism in post-World War II America, came across Mr. Swope and Mr. Hurstâ€™s book by accident in a Borders last year, reached out to them through their publisher, and sketched in many of the details.

Casa Susanna was owned by Susanna herself â€” the court translator, otherwise known as Tito Valenti â€” and Valentiâ€™s wife, Marie, who conveniently ran a wig store on Fifth Avenue and was happy to provide makeover lessons and to cook for the weekend guests. It was a place of cultivated normalcy, where Felicity, Cynthia, Gail, Fiona and the others were free to indulge their radical urges to play Scrabble in a dress, trade makeup tips or walk in heels in the light of day.

â€œThese men had one foot in the mainstream and the other in the margins,â€ Mr. Hill said the other day. â€œIâ€™m fascinated by that position and their paradox, which is that the strict gender roles of the time were both the source of their anxiety and pain, and also the key to escaping that pain.â€

What still moves Murray Moss, the impresario behind Moss the store, about the images in the book is their ordinariness. â€œYou think of man dressed as woman and you think extremes: itâ€™s kabuki, Elizabethan theater, Lady Macbeth,â€ he said. â€œItâ€™s also sexual. But these arenâ€™t sexual photos. The idea that they formed a secret society just to be ... ordinary. Itâ€™s like a mirror held up to convention. Itâ€™s not what you would expect. Itâ€™s also not pathetic. Everybody looks so happy.â€

At first, Casa Susanna was a thrilling place, said Sandy, a divorced businessman, â€œbecause whatever your secret fantasies were you were meeting other people who had similar ones and you realized, â€˜I might be different but Iâ€™m not crazy.â€™ â€ Now 67 and living in the Northeast, he hasnâ€™t cross-dressed for decades, and asked that his identifying details be veiled. He was a graduate student in 1960, he said, living in New York and visiting Casa Susanna on the weekends.

â€œIt was the most remarkable release of pressure, and it meant the world to me then,â€ he said. â€œIâ€™d grown up in a very conventional family. I had the desire to marry, to have the house, the car, the dog. And I eventually did. But at that point there were all these conflicting desires that had no focal points. I didnâ€™t know where I fit.â€

Sandy remembers one weekend sharing a cabin with another man and his girlfriend. â€œShe obviously accepted the situation with him for better or worse,â€ Sandy began. â€œAnyway, I didnâ€™t get dressed until later in the day, and when I did, the girlfriend was just coming down the stairs. â€˜Oh my,â€™ she said, â€˜you certainly have made a change. I have to tell you, I much preferred the person who got out of the car.â€™ And with that she reached under my dress and groped me. She said, â€˜Itâ€™s a shame to have all that locked up in there.â€™ In one sense, it was titillating, in another, depressing. And yet in another way, it put a finger on the issue.â€





Casa Susanna was a testing ground for many. Katherine ***mings, who went by Fiona at Casa Susanna, was born John ***mings in Scotland 71 years ago. Now living in Sydney, she has been a transsexual for more than 20 years, as well as a librarian and an editor. When she was 28, she took a post-doctoral degree in Toronto, and spent her weekends at Casa Susanna, the first place, she said last week, where she could dress openly. In her 1992 memoir, â€œKatherineâ€™s Diary,â€ she writes hilariously about a late October weekend, shivering in the cold bungalows, and accepting a ride from the main house down to the cabin she had been assigned with a burly man in slipshod makeup and a slapped-on wig. She turned to the back seat and froze: there lay a nightstick, handcuffs and other police paraphernalia. Turns out her chauffeur was the sheriff of a small New Jersey town.

The resort catered to hunters as well, Ms. ***mings said, and sometimes there was overlap. â€œLibby, who was very beautiful, was also Lee, who was a very macho person. And one day the hunters were there and so were we and they all had a great time discussing rifles.â€

Mostly the guests talked and talked. â€œThey talked about fashion, and passing, and how and if theyâ€™d told their wives or girlfriends,â€ said Ms. ***mings, who is divorced and has three daughters. â€œIn those days we didnâ€™t know where we were going.â€

They had parties, and even a convention of sorts, one Halloween in 1962, that drew cross-dressers from all over the country, as well as a few psychologists from the Kinsey Institute. Led by the irascible pharmacologist Virginia Prince, who made them their own magazine, Transvestia, for which Susanna was a columnist dispensing exhortatory advice and tips on deportment and makeup, many of them formed a loose collective that decades later grew into a not-so-secret society called Tri-Ess (a k a the Society for the Second Self).

â€œI remember the first morning we all arrived,â€ Ms. Prince said last week, â€œand all these, letâ€™s just call them people, descended on the bathrooms and you see all these folks in their nighties and kimonos and so forth standing around shaving. It was a very amusing sight. Beards tend to grow. I had mine removed years ago.â€

Ms. Prince became known as the founder of the transgender movement, and wrote copiously on the subject for science and sex research journals and conferences, irritating more than a few Casa Susanna graduates, who werenâ€™t comfortable with the politicizing of their issues, or the strict categories she created. Born male (and still biologically male), she has been living as a woman for the past 40 years. At 94, sheâ€™s no longer allowed to drive, but she leads the Lollies (â€œlittle old ladies like me,â€ she said the other day) at her California retirement home in a study group (theyâ€™re covering astronomy this month) and drives a red scooter.

â€œI invented gender,â€ she said proudly. â€œThough if the ladies here find out Iâ€™m a biological man Iâ€™m a dead duck.â€

Of Susanna herself, the trail ends with her last column for Transvestia in 1970, when she, like Virginia, announced her plans to live henceforth as a woman.

â€œScene: The porch in the main house at our resort in the Catskill Mountains,â€ Susanna writes in a snippet from one of her early columns, courtesy of Mr. Hillâ€™s research, and trimmed a bit. â€œThe time: About 4 oâ€™clock in the morning as Labor Day is ready to awaken in the distant darkness. The cast: Four girls just making small talk. ... Itâ€™s dark in the porch; just a row of lights illuminate part of the property at intervals â€” perhaps a bit chilly at 2,400 feet. ... An occasional flame lighting a cigarette throws a glow on feminine faces â€” just a weekend at the resort, hours in which we know ourselves a little better by seeing our image reflected in new colors and a new perspective through the lives of new friends.â€


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## Adrienne (Nov 3, 2008)

I love reading old articles, It amazes me to read old ads for cosmetics and their outlandish claims. Even though cd has become more acceptable, it is still hard to be accepted as many people think of all cds as homosexuals when infact that's not always the case. I don't see how I can dress in my husbands clothes and that's normal but a man puts on a little makeup and that's "gay." Sounds like a double standard to me.


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## Darla (Nov 3, 2008)

thanks Adrienne, i appreciated your comments.

I thought the comment about how the clothing was just to fit in was significant to me. It always seemed that someone starting out would try and dress real flashy or maybe even a little slutty. Eventually if your goal is to just look real natural you might pick stuff out that is more similar to what other women might wear.


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## Darla (Nov 3, 2008)

there is a collection of photographs that evidently didn't make the book here


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## laurafaye (Nov 3, 2008)

Thanks for posting, Darla. It was very interesting to read


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## Johnnie (Nov 3, 2008)

Yes, thanks for posting. Very neat to read up on this stuff. I never really thought there was much of this going on in those days. It's pretty cool


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## RoxRae (Nov 3, 2008)

Thanks for posting that! I find that article to be extremely interesting.


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## S. Lisa Smith (Nov 3, 2008)

Loved the article, thanks!


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## Darla (Nov 3, 2008)

To put this in context it was illegal for men to appear in public back then. here was a picture from a club in NYC in 1962 with some girls getting rounded up to head to jail.


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## Anthea (Nov 3, 2008)

Thanks Darla for posting this, its great that people will know the some of difficulties of being TG, especially in the early days. Its a few years since I've read this article, basically there have been transgender people in varying forms since the beginning of time. Many TG people have to be secretive about it (even today) for fear of loss of family,friends and job.

Many people also think its a lifestyle of choice, here is an article in the Sydney Morning Herald from only last week with a scientific study that suggests otherwise Click Here


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## Janet Wyrock (Jan 17, 2012)

Re: A Safe House for the Girl Within. Thanks for posting that article Darla. I never knew of anyplace to go when I first started crossdressing. A place such as Casa Susanna would have been great. I started crossdressing after my divorce in 1981. Crossdressing was not an issue of the divorce. I was living in North Riverside, Illinois at the time in a small efficiency apartment. Due to sending child support at the time, I couldn't afford even a one bedroom apartment. I knew there were probably affordable apartments in the city of Chicago but didn't want to live in an area that may have been below standards. At least I had a small kitchen and a hide-a-bed and my own bathroom with tub/shower. My first adventures out dressed were just rushing to my car and driving around dressed. At a forest preserve it was deserted I got out of my car and walked around in my dress, heels and had my wig and some makeup on. Was scared and didn't walk very far and returned to my car and went back to my apartment. I tired this type of adventure a few more times going out and driving around dressed as a female. Soon that was not enough and the first public outing was to a movie theater in La Grange, IL. Not much of an exposure to the public as there were very few people going into the theater when I was there. At least the ticket seller didn't refuse to issue me a ticket to see the movie. I managed to speak in a soft voice and also purchased a bag of popcorn at the concession counter. I sat in the very last row next to the isle in case I wanted to exit the theater swiftly  /emoticons/[email protected] 2x" width="20" height="20" />. One of the ushers kept coming in and checking on me to see I guess if I was not doing anything out of the ordinary :icon_conf. At least going to the movie theater was a little more than going out driving around dressed as a female. I don't think there were any support groups then or any night clubs that would have been safe to go dressed. A year or so later some crossdresser put an advertisement in the personals add section in the Sunday Chicago Tribune wanting to contact other 'transvestites'. The 'Crossdresser' term was not a known then. So I wrote to the PO Box and told the advertiser I was a transvestite and would meet in a safe place. The male replied back and suggested I meet him at a church where he was going to be serving for a pancake breakfast in the church basement. I thought that would be a safe place and went to meet him. He insisted he was a Heterosexual and was thinking about forming a support group for transvestites. He mentioned that he was going to place another add in the paper for a picnic for others if they were interested in forming a group for transvestites. The picnic was to be held at a forest preserve in a northern suburb of Chicago. I went there and for a while the two of us were the only people who showed up. I didn't think anyone else would show so I left. I guess a few others showed up a half hour after I left. Not sure what the outcome of the picnic was as my contract for working in the Chicago area ended and the next contract was in Ft Lauderdale, Florida. Possiby the picnic was a start for one of the support groups around Chicago at the time. I never tried to contact the person who originally placed the adds in the Chicago Tribune. While on assignment in Ft Lauderdale I remembered seeing some adds about Fantasies In Lace store in a couple of transvestite magazines I purchased at adult book stores. So I visited Fantasies In Lace store. The person at the counter probably was the owners wife. Nervous but wanted to purchase a new wig. So the woman told me it was OK and asked if I were a crossdresser. I was in male attire that day. I told her yes I crossdressed and was thinking about a new wig. She took me back to the wig fitting area and tried on various styles and colors. I thought about a blonde color but she said that might attract to much attention. So settled on a brown color very close to my natural male colored hair. The she asked me as I was paying for the wig if I were interested in attending a birthday party for her husband Terri who was co-owner of the Fantasies In Lace store. I said if there were going to be other crossdressers there I would like to attend and she gave me a complementary ticket for the night club where the birthday party was going to be held. Then also she mentioned that there was a private club where there was a crossdressers night and asked me if I wanted to puchase a membership to attend those events. I said sure and that was the start of some great times. Meeting Terri and his wife from Fantasies In Lace and other crossdressers at the private club while I was on assignment in the Ft Lauderdale area.


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## Carol D. (Jan 24, 2012)

A really interesting article, Darla, thanks for posting it!

When I was a kid, I remember seeing a similar photo in one of the Chicago newspapers of guys dressed as women being arrested and I remember wondering if that might happen to me some day. It just wasn't something to discuss with one's parents back then, or anyone else for that matter, so I think we all did pretty much the same thing, hid our real selves away and hoped that it would get better in the future somehow. 

Carol


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## Debglam (Jan 24, 2012)

Thanks for the post!  I own the book and it is really terrific!  Kind of nice to know that this stuff has been going on since before I was born, probably forever!  I remember how lonely I felt as a kid thinking I was the only one in the world who felt this way!  I think the latest numbers are that some number LESS than 1:500 are transgendered!  A lot more of us out there than I ever imagined!


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